Book Image

Data Analytics Using Splunk 9.x

By : Dr. Nadine Shillingford
5 (1)
Book Image

Data Analytics Using Splunk 9.x

5 (1)
By: Dr. Nadine Shillingford

Overview of this book

Splunk 9 improves on the existing Splunk tool to include important features such as federated search, observability, performance improvements, and dashboarding. This book helps you to make the best use of the impressive and new features to prepare a Splunk installation that can be employed in the data analysis process. Starting with an introduction to the different Splunk components, such as indexers, search heads, and forwarders, this Splunk book takes you through the step-by-step installation and configuration instructions for basic Splunk components using Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances. You’ll import the BOTS v1 dataset into a search head and begin exploring data using the Splunk Search Processing Language (SPL), covering various types of Splunk commands, lookups, and macros. After that, you’ll create tables, charts, and dashboards using Splunk’s new Dashboard Studio, and then advance to work with clustering, container management, data models, federated search, bucket merging, and more. By the end of the book, you’ll not only have learned everything about the latest features of Splunk 9 but also have a solid understanding of the performance tuning techniques in the latest version.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with Splunk
5
Part 2: Visualizing Data with Splunk
10
Part 3: Advanced Topics in Splunk

Understanding container management

The AWS instances we spun up in Chapter 2, Setting Up the Splunk Environment, were cloud-based containers. In this section, we will look at containers in general. What is a container? A container is a software development concept that allows multiple isolated processes to share the same OS kernel. The idea of multiple isolated processes sharing a host (virtualization) is not a new one. Organizations have used virtual machine technology in various forms for decades. For example, IBM introduced virtualization concepts with the CP-40 in 1967. VMware, one of the well-known virtual machine platforms, was patented in 1998.

Containerization, as we know it today, was introduced in 2013 with the development of Docker. A Docker container is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering where software is packaged with all the libraries, code, tools, and configuration files that they need to run isolated on a host. Containers such as Docker share the host’...